Myself, standing on the Youngstown and Southern tracks, Columbiana, Ohio, 1972
Dear Columbiana:
Eight years ago, facing the Firestone Park pond on a cool, clear summer morning, I sat on a green wooden bench. The same one upon which I sat as a child and cast a line for little bluegills that glimmered with iridescence as I reeled them out of the water. Just one of the shimmering memories of my years among you, from first through seventh grade.
That was my last visit to the place I still call my hometown. I’d love to go back, but I live in California, and travel is a bit tricky these days. I’d love to do it in person, but I’m 67 years old, and if I’m ever going to say “Thank you, Columbiana,” now would be the time.
I’m grateful to everybody and everything in Columbiana. Not because everybody and everything was perfect, but because everybody and everything gave me a wonderful childhood. And at this point in my life, I’m more aware than ever of that privilege and its enduring benefits.
We didn’t lock our doors. We played outside all day and nobody cared where we went until dinner. We ran free in the woods, built forts, played army in vacant lots with trenches and tunnels and dirt clods, caught minnows in the creek, collected fossils and rocks, wandered up and down the Youngstown and Southern railroad until the train whistle frightened us off the tracks, rode bikes with fat tires caked in fresh tar and gravel. We played pee-wee football on the icy asphalt of Columbiana High School’s play yard. We cut down trees and built towers tied together with twine with our amazing Scoutmaster, Norman Spiker, who knew everything about how to live in the wilderness. We swung like joyful monkeys on the exposed pipes in the dank basement bathrooms of the decrepit high school building. And oh, those wonderful mouldering basements of our houses! – where we played chess on the cool cement floors on sweltering hot days, where we played ping-pong in the winter.
At the Columbiana Public Library, that temple of knowledge where my family made a weekly pilgrimage, we were met by the forbidding old woman at the front desk who licked her index finger before she used it to turn the pages of the books. (I avoided touching the corners of the pages as a consequence.) My (still) best friend, Bruce Urbschat, and I competed with each other in our reading. He kept track of the books he completed in a journal with graph paper. (He’s still doing it. It’s a thick journal with three columns on each side of each sheet. He’s the best-read human being I’ve ever known.) On our way home from school we’d walk together and before parting ways to our respective houses, we’d stop at a big rock at North Elm and Parkview and keep the conversation going – deeper and deeper as we grew older and read more books.
When I was in the seventh grade, I got curious about the origins of our town. In the library, I found a history of Columbiana County in which I discovered the provenance of its name. When it was proposed in the Ohio state legislature, a comic uproar ensued. “Why stop there? Why not keep going and call it Columbianamaria?” asked one lawmaker, as I recall the story. I found this to be wildly funny. Funnier than other versions of the town’s name that we used at the time, such as “Clumsybanana”. We were about as far away from the comedy acts of Hollywood and Broadway as you could get, but I have never laughed so hard in my life as I did in Columbiana. A bunch of us boys stayed overnight at Mark Crook’s place and watched the grainy black and white TV showing Ghoulardi’s zany interruptions of grade-C horror movies on the Cleveland station, and we laughed so hard we could barely breathe. Then there was Polar Bear Camp, when our Scout troop pitched tents on a weekend of wet snow. In the middle of the night we needed to pee, so we just lifted the side tent flap and let ‘er fly. In the morning, we roared when we saw the sheet of yellow ice on the tent next to ours! We made our own fun in Columbiana - and we made a lot of it.
I’m grateful for the education I got in Columbiana… both the formal and informal kind. Doing well in school was easy for me. I had a lot of support and encouragement from my parents. My friend Bruce and I competed academically, getting both of us ahead. I had some really wonderful teachers, and didn’t much object to the ones who weren’t so great. In third grade, Mrs. Schaeffer challenged us with writing reports. Bruce and I tried to out-do each other, but his handwriting was so much better that he outclassed me every time. In those days, the schools “tracked” students early on, segregating those of different academic performance into separate classes. This seemed perfectly normal to me at first, but when I saw how poorly my little brother, who had a harder time in school, was treated by the system, I learned about its dark side. In the seventh grade, I put my lunch sack in the locker in the CHS building, and when I went to retrieve it, it had a grid of neat holes chewed into it by the rats who lurked behind the metal grate at the back. My parents educated me that this was the result of the failure of the voters to pass a tax increase to support the schools.
After the untimely death of a family friend, I got educated about the fact that for all its charms, Columbiana was also, at the time, a bedroom community for the Youngstown mafia. When I went collecting dimes and quarters for subscriptions to the Columbiana Ledger, which I delivered in my neighborhood on my Schwinn, one door was answered by a woman wearing a flour sack as a nightgown. What I saw inside that house educated me about the existence of a thing called poverty, right next door to middle-class abundance.
At the Presbyterian Church, I was the kid with questions that the Sunday School teachers could not answer. I had the strong sense that the subject matter of church was of ultimate importance, but I could not square what I heard with what I was learning about science. I had a natural mysticism, experiencing indescribable ecstasies while wandering alone in the woods along the Y and S tracks behind our house on North Elm. Those memories haunt and enchant my soul to this day. The jumble of questions and spiritual experiences in my childhood in Columbiana propelled me toward my career as a progressive Christian pastor.
In the course of earning merit badges for Boy Scouts, I met kind and caring adults who made me trust the goodness of the people of Columbiana. Like the postman who loved rocks and fossils as much as I did, and happily opened his home and his collection to me when I was getting the geology badge. Not just our little brick house, but the whole town became my home. It felt to me like it was all the universe a person could need or want – and within it, so much to explore and discover.
Then came 1966. I was dimly aware of the war, the civil unrest, the social change, the counterculture. It was time of upheaval everywhere except, it seemed, in Columbiana. And that was just fine with me.
Until the day that year that my dad, an engineer at the Kaiser Refractories brick plant on the edge of town, announced that he had been transferred back to California, from whence our family had come. Although I was perfectly content in Columbiana, I could not help but be excited to return to the land of sunshine, mountains, and beaches, where we made periodic visits.
On the day I started the eighth grade in Santa Cruz, California, I opened the door of my home room, looked at all the kids with tanned skin and long hair, and started laughing. I had never seen creatures like them before. Soon enough, I was one of them.
But I’m one of you, still, Columbiana… and ever shall be. I owe so much of who I am, and who I am glad to be, to you.
Thank you.
Yours always,
Jim Burklo